Chorus (each with 80-plus members, and often appearing on large city occasions like the prestigious February Festival) and the smaller Sherwood Choral Society (30–40 members: see figure 29 and further discussion in chapter 18). Some continued the tradition of the older locally based choral societies, like the Newport Pagnell Singers, with their roots in the Wolverton Choral Society, dating back to early in the century; the Stratford Singers at Stony Stratford (see figure 20), ‘one of the most popular choirs in Milton Keynes’, according to the local newspaper, formed in 1974 ‘to sing together for our pleasure and that of the audience’; and, until it ended in 1980, the Bletchley Ladies Choir, dating from the 1940s.
Most larger choirs were (like the orchestras) based on the accepted British ‘voluntary association’ model, with written constitution, elected officers and committee, formalised membership subscriptions and accounts, and Annual General Meeting. They normally rehearsed one evening a week throughout the year with a break in the summer, meeting in one or other of the local halls or in village, school or community meeting-places. They had broadly similar yearly cycles. A Christmas concert was usually one high point – so much so that a city-wide committee tried (not altogether successfully) to arbitrate between choirs’ claims for the same Saturday evenings in December. There was also often a major concert in the spring or summer, with occasional smaller performances at other times in the year.
Each was worked for according to an accepted routine of rehearsals and performance. It started with detailed practisings of isolated parts of the works under the conductor (and perhaps his or her assistant), singing to piano accompaniment, then moved gradually towards consolidating the piece as a whole, culminating in the intensity of the later rehearsals when the work began to ‘come together’, then the great but sometimes traumatic rehearsal on the afternoon of the concert (often a revelation to the choir as for the first time they heard the whole work complete with solos and full accompaniment). Last came the experience of the full evening performance before an audience.
This cycle of rehearsal-performance was a recurrent one, especially when, as commonly with the large choirs, the music came from the renowned classical repertoire of oratorio and church music. These were mostly four-part works, ideally with orchestral accompaniment and visiting soloists, by such composers as Handel (Messiah was still one of the great popular pieces, the music known to most singers), together with Haydn, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Bach, Vivaldi, Fauré, and others in the recognised classical canon whose works were over the years sung alternately by the various local choirs. These formed the core of the expected choral repertoire, but there were also concerts of more modern works, especially English compositions by, say, Vaughan Williams or Britten, ‘light classics’ by Bizet or Sullivan, and arrangements of both popular and esoteric carols. Many choir members were already acquainted with much of the classical repertoire (some had been choral singers for 30, 40 or even 50 years). At the least, they had long-practised skills in sight-reading from written music (an essential requirement for every choir) and in recognising familiar cadences and styles. The classical ideal in terms of repertoire, highly graded direction, and aspirations to a ‘high-standard’ performance was very much to the fore, expressed through the actual singers on the ground who had gained their expertise through a process of informal learning and practising in the amateur tradition.
The same general patterns were also followed by the many smaller choirs like the Orphean Singers, Fellowship Choir, Guild Singers, Canzonetta Singers, Miscellany, St Martin Singers, Woburn Sands Band Madrigal Group and the all-female Erin Singers. Many of these continued over the years, but there were also shorter-lived groups like the New City Choral Society, the Bletchley Further Education College Choir and some who appeared under fluctuating names (the Senior Citizens’ Choir developing into the Melody Group, for example). There were also temporary groups who sang together just for a particular occasion, whether large, like the 180-strong Festival Choir (the joint Danesborough Chorus and Milton Keynes Chorale) at the 1982 Milton Keynes February Festival, or small, like the Village Maidens from the local Women’s Institute, who sang after a Christmas pantomime at Stoke Hammond School, and, finally, the various madrigal groups that formed from time to time. Many smaller choirs put on several small events during the year rather than working up one or two main works on the model of the rehearsal–performance cycles of the larger choirs, and sang frequently at churches, fêtes or clubs to raise money for some local good cause or provide entertainment at hospitals or old people’s homes. But here too there was still a stress on rehearsing to reach as high a standard as possible, almost always with a piano accompaniment and under the direction of a conductor. The different categories shaded into each other, of course, and some small choirs had highly qualified conductors or practitioners in classical music terms (the Open University Choir, for example, or the Tadige Singers), but in general the smaller choirs laid less emphasis on specialist classical training and (unlike the larger, more ambitious choirs) quite often had female conductors.
The number of choirs in the area was thus great. There were perhaps 100 in all, with membership ranging from 90 or so down to around 12–15 (a not uncommon number for the smaller groups), or as few as 5 or 6 in some church choirs. The total number of choral singers in the area was thus probably well over 1,000, though it is hard to calculate exact numbers because of the amount of multiple membership – another notable feature of the choral tradition.
These many choirs and instrumental groups practised through the year without always being especially noticeable except to those most directly involved. However, there were points in the year when their activities became more prominent. At Christmas practically every choir and orchestra gave performances, and there were also a great many concerts towards the end of the summer term in the school year. Easter too had its performances, together with other key festivals in the Christian year (especially, but not only, by the church groups). Another high point was February. The annual ‘February Festival’, initially promoted by the MKDC arts division, included both nationally and internationally known professional artists from outside the area, and a few of the leading local groups.
February was also the month of the Milton Keynes (earlier Bletchley) Festival of Arts, a more modest and locally generated event, which followed the established music festival tradition of competitive classes in music, dance and speech for both children and adults in a wide range of ages and standards, judged by visiting adjudicators. It included classes for solo singers and performers on just about every classical instrument, band, recorder groups, small ensembles, and church choirs. The largest choirs and orchestras did not enter, but the festival still provided a showpiece of the classical music world in Milton Keynes. Over the days of the festival, many hundreds of entrants came forward and performed in two Bletchley halls, from piano classes for tiny tots to ‘recital classes’ by young aspirants for music college entrance. The festival had grown from one day in 1968 to an event of more than a week and over 3,000 entrants (almost 80 per cent of them local) by the mid 1980s.
But a mere catalogue gives no real taste of what these many musical activities meant to the participants. This was something over and above the time and work they put into them or the incidental results (sociability or friendship or status) that certainly also often flowed from them. The rewards for those committed to the classical music world are hard to capture in precise words, but they certainly included a sense of beauty and fundamental value, of intense and profoundly felt artistic experience which could reach to the depths of one’s nature. For participants in this world there was perhaps nothing to equal the experience of engaging in a beautiful and co-ordinated performance of some favoured classical work, whether in practice or (at a heightened level) in public concert: the expectant thrill of players or singers entering a hall in their special dress ready for performance, the familiar and evocative sounds of tuning up in front of the audience, the hushed moment as the performers gathered themselves to start or the conductor called all eyes by lifting his baton, and the split second of silence (more of symbolic quality than measured time) at the end before performers and audience returned alike to the everyday world. For those steeped in the classical tradition these richly symbolic moments were experienced
